


Yggdrasil, Aetherius, and the Scottish Highlands: A Travelogue for Recovering Muggles

by davemats95



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Wizard101
Genre: Dimension Travel, Dysfunctional Family, Fairy Tale Elements, Family, Gen, Multi, Past Child Abuse, Pre-Hogwarts, Redeemed Dudley Dursley, Runes, Smart Harry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-21
Updated: 2016-06-21
Packaged: 2018-07-16 08:20:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7259866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/davemats95/pseuds/davemats95
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dudley wasn't always a wizard. He wasn't always a hero. He certainly wasn't always Harry's best friend.</p><p>It's been a bumpy ride getting from there to here.</p><p>A retelling of Players in a Game of Magic in which shortcuts hurt, Hogwarts actually has plenty to teach, and Dudley is the best damn sidekick ever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Yggdrasil, Aetherius, and the Scottish Highlands: A Travelogue for Recovering Muggles

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Players in Game of Magic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1141748) by [davemats95](https://archiveofourown.org/users/davemats95/pseuds/davemats95). 



Chapter 1: Once Upon a Time

 

The point of giving chase wasn't really to catch him. If it was, I'd have stopped ‘hunting’ Harry the day I started.

 

Nine-year-old me was a fat little piglet, and running wasn't exactly my forte. I guess Piers Polkiss was fast enough to get the job done, but Harry was smarter than all of my little gang put together—we almost never got him.

 

So why bother running after him until the sweat ran down my fat rolls and it hurt to breathe? If you have to ask, you’ve never hated someone.

 

You’ve never met someone whose name could poison a dinner or your birthday, someone whose presence melts the face of your mother into something angry and painful to watch, or someone whose voice lights up every nerve in your body until you want to punch them until they scream.

The point of hunting Harry wasn't to catch him, it was to make sure he felt hunted—unable to relax between the grind of schoolyard bullying and the burden of my parents’ torture at home

 

You see, I didn't care if I was fat, ugly, and failing every class. If I could make Harry suffer for just a moment, my day had meaning.

 

It's hard to talk about how I was, you know. Most people like to think they're the heroes of their own story. It’s not fun to realize you’re just the ugly step-sister, or remember being truly evil to someone you love like a brother.

 

You want to know what changed? That’s a pretty simple story.

 

Once upon a time, there was a boy who chased his freakish cousin. The boy and his gang split up to find their elusive prey. The boy lucked out and spotted the freak, so he ran across the street to grab him...and was clipped by a passing car. The boy flew a few feet and slammed his skull into the roadside. The car, unlike the boy, kept moving.

 

Sounds fun right? I wasn’t even lucky enough to pass out;everything hurt. I wasn’t exactly with it at the moment, but I was aware of two things: 1) Things had gone very wrong and 2) Harry was still with me.

The sap was kneeling next to me; crying, saying (and by that I mean screaming) “please don’t die,” over and over again.

 

Then I was perfectly fine.

 

One moment, car crash victim—the next completely healthy kid. As I stood up, Harry looking surprised and relieved, I knew exactly what had happened.

 

It wasn’t like I didn’t know odd things happened around Harry (despite my mother’s best efforts). The mysterious shrinking sweater incident and the time Harry grew his hair back overnight sort of put the kibosh on that.

.

(I didn’t understand anything important back then.)

 

“How? Why?” I asked.

“I don’t...I...I just didn’t want you to hurt anymore.”

 

I don’t really remember the rest of that day, but I do remember that Harry’s words made me feel small.

 

The person whose suffering I lived for didn’t want me to hurt. Even at ten I realized that what Harry had done for me was something special, impossible.

  
Harry never meant ill and he was special. It’s the story of his life isn’t it?

* * *

 

Things didn’t change drastically after that, at least not at first, my life just sort of sucked more.

 

It wasn’t that I adored Harry after he saved my life—far from it. I just didn’t think he was the source of all evil. I thought he was ‘alright’.

 

That’s an important distinction, since only the source of all evil could deserve what Harry went through at home. I never enjoyed how Harry made my mother and father feel just by existing. I always thought his punishments were a way of redressing that, making the world right again.

 

Just the very thought, ‘he’s alright,’ poisoned my life. You can’t watch a bloke who’s 'alright' starve for days, get beaten for things you wouldn’t even be yelled at, and get stuffed in a cupboard every night.

Eventually, you start to realize that Mommy and Daddy are sort of sick f@%&s.

* * *

 

I didn’t grow up in a complete bubble. I had movies, tv, and comic books. It was sort of inevitable.

 

Once upon a time, I watched Harry scrubbing the floors on his knees and said, “I think you’re a fairy princess—but like a guy.”

 

It only made sense that Harry was a character from a fairy tale. Harry was ok, and Harry suffered, and Harry was ( _maybe?_ ) magical. Uncles and aunts sort of even counted as evil step-parents. Maybe my parents were contractually obligated to treat him like dirt.

 

Harry didn’t particularly appreciate being called a fairy princess, but it did do something for him. Some time later, he told me that the idea that he was meant for something; that his life was just a prelude to the start of a story, made it so much easier to be strong. Even if he didn’t fully believe it, it gave him hope.

* * *

 

Life at school wasn’t great.

 

I was pretty done with Harry hunting, and when it came to messing with other kids, I had my own issues to think about. The “activities” that bonded my circle of friends faded away, and I was suddenly alone. I was too big to get picked on, so it wasn’t so bad. Of course, kids didn’t want to be my friends either. The memory of “Big D” didn’t fade that quickly

 

Eventually, I found the little nooks and crannies where Harry set up shop away from everyone else. We would sit together quietly at first, waiting for recess to end.

 

Once upon a time, as we sat in an empty classroom, I was bored enough to open the teacher’s desk.

 

Once upon a time I found a copy of _Grimm’s Fairy Tales_

 

I grinned evilly. “It’s for you princess.”

 

Harry didn’t get ruffled. He just took the book and read it in silence.

 

One day, Harry read it aloud.

 

I learned of orphans and stepmothers, witches and fairies, people and things that changed shape and size and purpose, and stories with blood and senselessness and that _somehow felt like truth_.

* * *

 

 

I’m still not a big fan of reading, but Harry did these great voices and… I guess it’s not particularly important.

 

Harry and I got through a lot of stories that school year. We also developed an obsession with figuring out Harry’s powers.

 

There were so many stories, so many ideas, and most of them were bitterly disappointing. Sometimes Harry could make things _happen_ , but it was never really under his control. Most of the time nothing would happen at all.

 

We didn’t stop trying because...well Harry had actual magic (or was one of the X-men, we weren’t picky), and no matter how “lame” a superpower is, it’s still the most exciting thing possible in a Muggle-raised kid’s life.

 

Eventually we did stumble over “real” magic, thanks to Tolkien. He’s a Muggle author  so you might’ve never heard of him. He wrote fantasy; with wizards and elves and the like. What made this Tolkien guy so useful to us is that he had these fully formed languages in his books.

One of them had writing similar to what students at Hogwarts learn in Ancient Runes class. Runes are sort of innately magical—even if Muggles write them. No one knows why, perhaps centuries of use by wizards has given them a life of their own, but that’s not important.

 

What _was_ important, was that Harry, by this point familiar with magic (if not functional magic), knew the (almost) real deal when he saw it.

 

Unfortunately, Harry and I grew up before Google (look up what that means yourself). We had to learn about runes the old fashioned way—by going to the library.

 

To the Muggle world, Elder Futhark runes are mainly a historical writing system. They’re not seen as something too dangerous to hand over Tolkien-obsessed infants. Of course, Muggles aren’t aware of all the runic letters, and they definitely don’t know all of the meanings for each symbol.

 

The Ministry would have been horrified to learn that Muggle scholars know runes used to be used in rituals.

 

What we learned in the Muggle world wasn’t everything—but it was certainly enough

* * *

 

Most witches and wizards have no real world use for runes.

 

Runes can’t bend the laws of reality like wand-magic or a potion. It can’t produce anything like mechanical precision of Arithmancy.

 

Runic magic doesn’t make any noises or produce light. It can work in as little as three seconds, or take action in three years, long forgotten, no longer needed, and maybe even dangerous. Sometimes it does exactly what you tell it to, and not what you want it to.

 

Runic magic, Galdr, is the magic of storytelling. Every rune has a meaning. Every rune has a name, and a form. By speaking their names or arranging their forms, you can make their meanings real.

 

If you’re good, you’ll pick the right ones and put them in the right order. If you have natural magical ability, you’ll even accomplish _some_ result every time.

 

Galdr isn’t a fireball or a defensive charm. It’s the sunlight blinding the guy you don’t want to see you, the spilled tea that helps you meet an old friend, and the improbable number of green lights on your way to work.

 

Anything can happen in life, runes just make some of them...more likely.

* * *

 

Harry’s first piece of Rune magic was a spell to defend himself from people who hurt him.

 

You think that’s why he got so far? Maybe, Galdr is pretty powerful stuff over time, but Wyrd and Fate are weird things. You never know how they’ll mesh; whether a Bindrune will fail just as you need it most, or if a plan is too perfect to be messed with by chance.

 

His second spell did the same for me. When I looked at his notes years later, _Protection Spell, Dudley_ was written on the first line of the first page. The runes below were crossed out many times.

 

The next entry was a single string of runes. After that, Harry’s chicken scratch writing.

 

“ _Tested spell on self for week. Works well. Dudley’s probably safe then, will do tonight. Use initials DD? Means renewal. New Chance. Reflects him?_ ”

* * *

 

My parents stopped hurting Harry. They also stopped dealing with us in general.

 

It wasn’t like we were invisible, or they moved out. We just...didn’t talk. It was always a phone call or a tea party for my mother or a busy day at work for my father.

 

Breakfasts somehow always happened when my parents were too dazed by sleep to notice how much Harry ate, or anything else really. Harry still cooked and cleaned, but my mom was too absorbed in her suddenly blooming social life to keep her eye on him.

 

My dad’s health started to catch up to him. He started to become too drained to bother with blowing his gasket at his nephew. His work didn’t suffer, but at home, his labored, wheezing breath became the new soundtrack of my childhood.

 

He didn’t die, he just sort of—faded.

 

Once upon a time, a boy’s magical cousin placed a blessing on him, so that he would be safe from those that would hurt him. The boy’s food became healthier in quality and quantity, his school became a brighter, happier place, and his mother ignored him while his father became a zombie.

 

Harry hasn’t ever asked me how I feel about it—he probably feels too guilty.

I don’t regret any of it. You’d have to grow up with us to realize how poisonous they were, how petty and nasty. They tried to starve their nephew, body and soul, until he withered into nothing. They tried to turn me into something as awful as them. Sometimes I dream about waking up amd seeing my Dad’s face in the mirror. He definitely deserved it.

I think Mom got off too easy...but I still miss her.

* * *

 

 

Harry never made me feel like I was second best. Anything he learned in the morning would get taught to me in the afternoon.

 

I can’t even describe what it felt like to realize I could use runes too. Not like Harry could, but then again I never expected that.

 

As a Muggle, small magic was always in my reach. Stopping a storm from coming until I went inside; making a cold end just a bit quicker; slowing down the clock a tiny bit when I was late to school.

 

Magic doesn’t belong to Wizards, they just enjoy easy access.

* * *

 

Once upon a time, I lived in little Whinging with my cousin Harry Potter. It was almost summer, we were almost ten, and we were fully bored.

 

We had no school, no friends, and no one to watch over us.

 

We made a spell, to bring us an adventure like the ones we found in Harry’s books. To make us grow, and to bring us home.

 

I feel asleep on my bed, and Harry slept below the stairs.

 

We both awoke standing, entirely somewhere else.

 


End file.
